New York has about 244 neighborhoods, depending on who you ask. Some large, others small, and many nested within each other like Russian dolls. The differences between them can be bold or subtle, obvious or hidden, and not always available to the immediate senses. Bringing these differences to light, providing insight and context to location, is something NabeWise is just a little obsessed with. A few weeks ago we released Version 2 of our mobile site, combining geolocation with quantitative and qualitative data to provide profiles for neighborhoods as they are traversed. Because the new mobile experience is vastly different from its predecessor, I thought it might be interesting to capture the reasoning and process that lead to the version we have today.
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The Project for Public Spaces defines placemaking as a formal process of improving public spaces, but I’m wondering if there isn’t personal or vernacular form of placemaking that occurs as an emergent property of individual and community behaviors. My brother, with a masters in Urban Planning, says that placemaking only pertains to the process at the formal level and ceases to have meaning in informal settings. So what do we call this form of intrinsic placemaking – what is the name for the behaviors that help us understand and connect to a place?
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In each of these cases, I would argue that the street, the urban street, as public space is to be differentiated from the classic European notion of more ritualized spaces for public activity, with the piazza and the boulevard the emblematic European instances. I think of the space of “the street,” which of course includes squares and any available open space, as a rawer and less ritualized space. The Street is a space where new forms of the social and the political can be made, rather than a space for enacting ritualized routines. With some conceptual stretching, we might say that politically “street and square” are marked differently from “boulevard and piazza”: the first signals action, and the second, ritual.
The Global Street Comes to Wall Street
Resolve to do lots of writing along the way. Much of it will be routine note-taking, but you should also write reflectively, to understand: make outlines; explain why you disagree with a source; draw diagrams to connect disparate facts; summarize sources, positions, and schools; record even random thoughts. Many researchers find it useful to keep a journal for hunches, new ideas, random thoughts, problems, and so on. You might not include much of this writing-to-discover-and-understand in your final draft. But when you write as you go, every day you encourage your own best critical thinking, understand your sources better, and, when the time comes, draft more productively.
The Craft of Research, 3rd Edition
In his talk, “New Soft City” during Interaction ’10, Dan Hill emphatically illustrates an approach to urban informatics that utilizes the fabric of the city as a medium for visualization.
Hill presents a diverse range of projects he’s been involved with over the years, the majority of which attempt to expose consumption metrics externally and make the invisible visible. All of the projects are incredibly inspiring (checkout the responsive architecture project for the design of the Masdar City Center), but I’m particularly struck by the collaboration with the State Library of Queensland for Sense and Sustainability, a platform for public art. For this project, the building housing The Edge was layered in a sensor network in order to capture data generated by the building, which was then turned into an API. Dan has already written about the street as a platform, and I think the building as API is a nice corollary.
In combination with initiatives like the EEML, a protocol for sharing real time sensor data, and the open source approach of the Urban Versioning System, a framework is starting to emerge that will give people the vocabulary and material to experiment with more complex feedback loops. We’ll have access to data generated not only by our social and financial activities, but by our environment as well. While I’m not sure what this means for urban growth and development or where it lies in dialogue around “smart cities”, I do think the four questions Dan closes with are something to consider:
- How do people expect systems to behave?
- How does information work as material?
- How should we extend the capabilities of people, buildings, and infrastructure?
- What new cities does this enable?
